A WORD FOR THE POOR TO LORD ALTHORP. 423 



into effect as the commissioners propose. In the rural districts, I am 

 confident that you will never be able to build the workhouses in- 

 tended, unless you build barracks first. Your builders, like Nehe- 

 miah's, must " every one have his sword girded by his side ;" for the 

 hand of every man, woman, and child will be upon them. I am not 

 justifying this disposition to resistance ; I am merely warning you of 

 the certainty .of its breaking forth ; and I trust that you will calculate 

 with temper, not merely the chances of suppressing it, but the mis- 

 chiefs that will ensue whether you succeed in repressing it or not. 



You are egregiously mistaken, my Lord, if you suppose that you 

 will have only the paupers to encounter a term which the commis- 

 sioners have applied so unfairly to the agricultural labourer, as to ex- 

 pose their utter ignorance of his situation. The agricultural labourer, 

 because he happens to receive from the poor rates, does not neces- 

 sarily consider himself a pauper. He conceives a pauper to be one 

 who is a voluntary incumbrance on the parish, because unable or un- 

 willing to maintain himself. But the man who has the ability and 

 the will to do so, and who, under the name of relief, merely accepts 

 from the occupiers, as a body, that which is really a balance of his 

 wages from some individual amongst them, regards himself in a very 

 different light. The collusion on the part of the occupiers is too gross 

 to deceive him ; and he feels no shame in taking the relief, because 

 he owns no favour for it. The maintenance which he receives, he 

 looks upon as his natural right ; he has a settled, and not very dispas- 

 sionate idea, that it is due to him from the land ; and if he has grown 

 indifferent whether it comes in the shape of wages or relief, it is be- 

 cause he knows that they are convertible terms. In the parish where 

 I reside, we had during the winter twenty-seven men on the books, 

 twenty-two of whom it would be a libel to call paupers. A depu- 

 tation of them remonstrated at the vestry against being sent to the 

 overseer for a " part of their wages," and, on being unheeded, their 

 spokesman addressed the meeting thus: "It is YOU, gentlemen, that 

 are living on the poor rates, and not WE ; the more labour you can get 

 paid for out of the rates, the more you make the little tradesmen, and cot' 

 tagers, and the labourers themselves, pay for your work being done!" 



But, paupers or not, my Lord, I must repeat my assurance, that it is 

 not this class alone whose ill-feelings you will excite. There is a 

 class above them, the independent labourers, as the commissioners call 

 them, who will entertain the measure with equal abhorrence. What- 

 ever may be the Arcadian notions of the commissioners, I know that the 

 independence of this description of labourers is no mighty matter ; and, 

 if it were, what security have they that it will last ? It depends upon 

 their capacity for bodily exertion, which a thousand accidents may 

 impair, and which old age, at least, will one day destroy. If to the 

 pauper I had better preserve the commissioner's nomenclature, 

 though I object to the propriety of it the doom of the workhouse is 

 certain and present, to the independent labourer it is a contingency, 

 which awaits him, at the farthest, in the evening of his days ; and can 

 any one imagine that he will calmly see a bridewell erected, to which 

 he is to be consigned without ceremony, as soon as it is found that a 

 life of hard and unremitting toil has sufficiently exhausted the vigour 

 of his constitution ? Again, has he no feelings of nature to consult ? 



